RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefire.org/news/i-grew-cuba-self-censorship-american-universities-all-too-familiar-me

Justo Antonio Triana is a senior at Syracuse University

Growing up in Cuba, I had to measure with surgical precision each of my words at school, knowing they could possibly be deemed “problematic,” meaning “counterrevolutionary,” meaning I — or worse, my family — could get in serious trouble for what I said.

There is no room for controversy in a totalitarian state. If your thoughts do not align with the only permissible truth, you are an enemy. And no one wants to be the enemy of a repressive apparatus that is bigger and stronger than you. No one likes to feel powerless.

I remember one morning the school administrators summoned all the students to a meeting. They wanted to inform us that some American musicians were going to visit our high school in a few hours as part of a cultural exchange program. A student asked the principal if we could talk to the musicians. The principal replied, “Of course you’re free to talk to them, but beware that everything you say has consequences.” 

It was crystal clear to us what her words meant: If you dare to make us look bad, we will make you regret it.

Arriving in the United States in 2019, I again found myself self-censoring in a classroom.

When the search for truth is sacrificed for the sake of not being canceled, the outcome is a superficial and sterile education.

The difference is that in America it is not primarily administrators who enforce ideological homogeneity, but other students. Unlike in Cuba, the censorial administrator’s role in the U.S. is a surrogate one. They do not threaten ideological dissenters directly, but rather simply construct speech-chilling policies and enable the illiberal majority to silence students with dissenting views. Aware of the potential reputational and financial cost of publicly expressing a sincere rejection of free speech, university officials opt to quietly draft speech codes whose definition of “hate” is wider than the Pacific Ocean and encourage students to denounce each other or their professors over the slightest disagreement. 

In America, they let students do the dirty work of pressuring their peers into silence.

The result is a campus culture in which students and faculty know that everything they say “has consequences” and the accused are guilty until proven innocent. In this culture, self-censorship is the norm. While we might all agree that we should be empathetic to our peers, and that a bigot shouldn’t feel comfortable making others miserable, the current obsession with political correctness on campus is not fostering a culture of mutual understanding and respect. It’s fostering one of distrust and fear — a climate that is all too familiar to me.

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com\

Elizabeth Willing Powel: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”Benjamin Franklin: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”      Philadelphia, September 17, 1787

That exchange took place 237 years ago outside Independence Hall, where delegates had met to discuss weaknesses in the Articles of Confederation, as they pertained to the central government. It was recorded in the journal of Maryland delegate James McHenry (1753-1816), a journal now in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. (The Articles of Confederation, agreed to in 1777, were replaced a decade later by the United States Constitution, which provided for a stronger central government.)

Democrats have seized the expression “save democracy,” which means elect them, not Republicans who they argue would destroy democracy. They express concern of storm troopers led by Donald Trump who they say would tear down our democratic institutions. But might this be an example of projection?

Our Founders were concerned about despotism, including what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they constructed a Republic, with checks and balances, a federal government with three equal and independent branches – legislative, executive and judicial – to protect the rights of both the majority and the minority.

In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, George Washington University law professor Jonathon Turley wrote: “In an October 2020 interview, Harvard law professor Michael Klarman laid out a plan for Democrats should they win the White House and both congressional chambers. They would enact ‘democracy-entrenching legislation.’ But what does that mean? They have called for the elimination of the Electoral College. They want to increase the size of the Supreme Court, and widen the reach of the federal bureaucracy through new administrative agencies.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/suicidal_jews.html

When individuals kill themselves, we look for answers in their DNA, their environments, their personal reactions to feelings of impotent rage, rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, and mental illness.

But how to explain group suicide?  There are numerous examples, going back to 206 B.C., and these relatively recent cases:

In 1943, in the final phase of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, many of the Jewish fighters besieged in the “bunker” at Miła 18 committed mass suicide by ingesting poison rather than surrender to the Nazis.
In 1945, about 1,000 residents of Demmin, Germany, committed mass suicide after the Red Army had sacked the town.
In 1978, 918 Americans — including 276 children — ingested cyanide in the Peoples Temple, after being exhorted and compelled to do so by their cult leader, Jim Jones, in Jonestown, Guyana.
In 1997, 39 followers of the Heaven’s Gate cult in California died in a mass suicide, believing they would travel on a spaceship that followed comet Hale — Bopp.

Clearly, some groups took their lives en masse for ideological reasons, whereas others — particularly vulnerable people in dire need of a “leader” — simply followed orders.  In all the mass suicides in recorded history, dozens, hundreds, and up to one thousand people took their own lives.

But today, when looking at suicidal Jews, the numbers could be in the millions!

Currently, out of a worldwide population of eight billion people, there are about 15 million Jews — approximately seven million in Israel, almost seven million in the United States, and one million throughout the world.  This is, by any measure, a few grains of sand compared to the massive total population of the world.

According to U.S. voting patterns, Jews are overwhelmingly liberal — up to 80 percent — which means they vote in huge numbers for leftists like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.  These people’s staffs have comprised, almost exclusively, career antisemites, who have done everything in their power to effect anti-Israel policies like the Iran nuclear deal, knowing that the fanatical mission of the mullahs in Teheran was — and is to this day — to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate every Jew in existence.

As Karin McQuillan explained in “Leftist Jew Hatred Has Come to America,” “the Left began with blacklisting and boycotting conservatives.  Now American Jews are in the crosshairs, no matter how liberal their politics.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/09/23/our-so-called-experts-and-their-silly-group-speak-letters/

One of the most preposterous recent trends has been the political use of supposed expert letters and declarations of support from so-called “authorities.”

These pretentious testimonies of purported professionalism are different from the usual inane candidate endorsements from celebrities and politicos.

Instead, they are used by politicians to impress and persuade the public to follow the “expertise,” “science,” or “authorities” to support all sorts of injurious initiatives and policies—of dubious value and otherwise without much political support.

Think of all the health experts who collectively swore to us that the COVID mRNA vaccinations would give us ironclad and lasting protection from being either infectious or infected and were without any side effects.

Other “authorities” assured us the first nationwide lockdown in U.S. history would stop COVID without hurting the social or economic life of the country.

Ditto testimonies about the pangolin-bat origins of COVID or the authenticity of the bogus Steele dossier.

Do we still remember the 1,200 healthcare “professionals” who in June 2020 told us that hitting the streets in mass numbers to protest during the post-George Floyd riots was a legitimate exemption from their own prior insistence on a complete nationwide quarantine? Or as these ideologues lectured us as “experts”:

“We wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response. We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health.”

To convince the public to get behind the agendas of politicians—increasingly on the left—ideologues round up groups of politically kindred professors, researchers, retired officials, and former bureaucrats to show off their supposed expertise and convince the public by means of their “authority”.

Perhaps one of the most notorious examples was the “70 arms control and nuclear experts,” who in 2015 were gathered together by Obama subordinates to persuade Americans to support the administration’s bankrupt Iran Deal—the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hezbollah-history-lesson/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

It’s hopeless, I know, but I still think the progressive Democrats fretting over collateral damage from Israel’s highly discriminating and proportionate “grim beeper” operation could benefit from a history lesson about Hezbollah’s barbaric treatment of Americans. I’ll have more on that over the weekend, but for starters, I’d recommend this 2015 piece by Matthew Levitt, an excellent analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. It’s about the kidnapping, torture, and murder of William Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Lebanon — i.e., the chief sent to set up a new station after Hezbollah, then led by Imad Mugniyah, bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Here’s a bit of it:

Buckley was tortured, reportedly by both Lebanese and Iranian interrogators. Another hostage, David Jacobsen, later recounted that Buckley occupied a cell separated from his own by a thin wall. “It was apparent that he was very sick. I could hear him retching between coughs.” Another hostage held with the two men recalled Buckley hallucinating. Once, in the bathroom, Buckley apparently announced, “I’ll have my hot cakes with blueberry syrup now.”

Hezbollah reportedly sent three different videotapes of Buckley being tortured to the CIA, each more harrowing than the next. These would become part of CIA lore, passed down from hardened case officers to new recruits, and the agency would not soon forget what Hezbollah did to one of their own.

By some accounts Buckley was moved through the Beqa Valley and transferred to Iran; others say he was buried in an unmarked grave in Lebanon. Mughniyeh’s Islamic Jihad Organization announced it had killed Buckley in October 1985, but fellow hostages would later reveal he had died months earlier as a result of the torture he endured, possibly at the hands of Imad Mughniyeh himself. According to former hostage David Jacobsen, when Buckley died in captivity, reportedly from drowning in his own lung fluids as a result of torture, it “really shook up our kidnappers.”

Years after Mugniyah was assassinated in 2008 (the tail end of the Bush-43 administration), it was revealed that he’d been killed in a joint CIA-Mossad intelligence operation. Prior to 9/11, he had more American blood on his hand than any jihadist — and lots of Israeli blood, too. He’d been a key planner in Hezbollah’s infamous 1983 attack on a military barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Marines.

Another planner of that attack was Fuad Shukr, on whom our government had offered a reward of $5 m

https://www.racket.news/p/interview-on-unherd-on-state-department

Last Friday, Josh Christenson at the New York Post published “State Department tried to discredit reporters, Republican pol over conservative ‘blacklist.’” The article described an internal memo showing the State Department strategizing public relations responses to the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky, me, and Republican congressman Jim Banks.

The memo criticizes Banks in an extremely devious way. The Indiana Republican last February was quoted by Gabe in the Examiner saying the Biden administration appeared to be “knee deep” in efforts to “crack down” on speech.

The State Department memo listed the Banks quote among its list of criticisms to answer. However, the agency didn’t quote the Examiner. It claimed to be quoting the Russian news agency RIA-Novosti, giving the impression that Banks offered his criticism of Biden in Russian state media:

The State Department memo

But Banks never spoke to RIA-Novosti, or any Russian agency. His quotes only appear in wholesale Russian translations (read: thefts) of Gabe’s Examiner article. The State Department and its counter-messaging arm, the Global Engagement Center, wanted so badly to create the impression Banks acted in service of Russian propaganda that they forgot to use the original Banks quote, instead re-translating the Russian version back to English. This resulted in the quote being reproduced incorrectly, ironic given GEC’s ostensible mission.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/ethics-proposal-would-undermine-the-supreme-court

Wielding “ethics” violations against one’s political foes is a Washington tradition. When it comes to ethics and the Supreme Court, observers should not be deceived. Current attacks on the justices’ ethics are bad-faith political barbs intended to undermine the Court—not expressions of genuine concern over actual transgressions. And the policy reforms being suggested to solve this nonexistent problem would do enormous damage to our most important legal institution while producing few, if any, countervailing benefits.

The latest proposal, which Justice Elena Kagan herself has championed, is to create an “enforceable” code for the justices. Details are sparse, but the basic idea is to empower lower court judges—whose work the Supreme Court reviews—to police the justices’ alleged ethical violations. Apparently, the chief justice would decide which lower court judges to endow with this extraordinary authority. Precisely what investigatory and enforcement tools those judges would wield remains unstated.

This proposal has several fundamental problems. For starters, it would give a future chief justice extraordinary power over his or her colleagues—power that some future, malevolent chief justice could easily abuse. By selecting the lower court judges who stand in judgment of the justices, the chief justice could put a thumb on the scale of those determinations. Gaining an upper hand on an intractable colleague would be as easy as stacking the ethics panel with that colleague’s antagonists. We can certainly hope no judge would abuse such authority. But to borrow from the old adage—if judges were angels, no ethics panel would be necessary.

And consider this dynamic in the context of a problem facing the Court right now: leaks of confidential information. Last weekend, the New York Times printed an exposé on the most recent Supreme Court term, replete with details of internal memos, the justices’ deliberations, and more. We have no idea who leaked this sensitive information to the Times—and particularly whether any justice was involved—but the leaks appear designed to undermine Chief Justice John Roberts and cast an unflattering light on the Court’s majority in certain important decisions. The judiciary’s ethical canons flatly prohibit politically motivated leaks of confidential judicial deliberations. Canon 4(D)(5) states: “A judge should not disclose or use nonpublic information acquired in a judicial capacity for any purpose unrelated to the judge’s official duties.” Presumably, a campaign to influence the chief justice and his colleagues by leaking “nonpublic information” to the New York Times would meet that description.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/this-is-not-the-america-we-were-promised/

The events of the last few years have confirmed that we are no longer a democracy in the sense that we once thought we were – and I know we’re a republic, but follow along with me. The premise of a democracy is that individual citizens can participate in the political process by making their positions known and voting for representatives who they understand will support their views. But those components are under attack here and throughout the West. They are under attack because our garbage elite considers our participation in our own governance to be both morally illegitimate and a practical nuisance. As a result, the elite is doing everything it can to prevent us from participating in our own governance. It’s intent to make us into serfs, disarmed, disenfranchised serfs who obey in silence.

After all, when citizens participate in their own governance, they may choose policies that the elite dislikes. And the elite doesn’t like the policies normal people prefer. Part of it is profit and power, and part of it is the elite’s moral grandstanding – don’t underestimate the power of politics to make spiritually empty people such as our trash ruling class feel good about themselves. The elite don’t like competition from the peasants. It cuts into their action and is generally inconvenient.

What does the elite want? Power. It wants unquestioned power over us that is not subject to any limitations by dissent or appeals to the law. Why do you think they hate the Supreme Court so much? SCOTUS gets in their way when it enforces our rights. Why do you think they hate the Electoral College so much? Because it makes it harder for them to leverage their kept constituencies to take the presidency.

The elite wants what we’re now getting: an administrative state where experts who just happen to share all the priorities and prejudices of the elite make all the decisions. Do you wonder why the left is so concerned about controlling academia? Because that’s where experts are made, and you don’t get expert certification unless you embrace the elite’s ideology. Do you think it’s a coincidence that they’re demanding DEI loyalty oaths from graduate students and professors? You must listen to experts, they tell us, and by the way, we get to decide who the experts are. Check out conservative stalwart Ned Ryun’s new book, “American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism,” which I read and gave him notes on in an early draft. Ned details exactly what’s going on here – the creation of an extra-constitutional fourth branch of government that effectively disintermediates citizens from any decision-making and controls every aspect of their lives without being subjected to any sort of accountability. That is the exact opposite of democracy, but it is part and parcel of Our Democracy that the ironically named Democrats embrace. Remember that when they say “Our Democracy,” they mean “ours,” as in “theirs.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/state-dept-officials-colluded-to-protect-iran-envoy-under-fbi-investigation/

Classified information is a very serious matter. Except 99% of the time when it’s not. About the only time that classified information is really a serious issue is when it can be used to raid a certain Florida venue.

The rest of the time it just doesn’t matter. Just ask Rob Malley and an entire administration that covered for him.

The Harris-Biden administration’s suspended Iran envoy Robert Malley may have taken part in a “classified White House-organized” call after his top secret security clearance was frozen over allegations of misconduct, according to the State Department’s internal watchdog.

The watchdog report politely describes this as deviating from normal standards. Much like Al Capone was deviating from normal negotiating procedures.

An official at the heart of the Iran outreach program had multiple State Department officials cover for him, lie on his behalf to Congress and to foreign governments to cover up the fact that he was under FBI investigation.

And it got worse from there.

On April 22, 2023, the State Department notified Malley of his clearance suspension and barred him from accessing the department’s “Sensitive But Unclassified [SBU] information system.”

However, days later, under pressure from senior officials, Malley’s access to sensitive information was restored, as was his access to his State Department email account.